Mathematical and Computer Programming Techniques for Computer Graphics, Comninos Peter

In Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries (such as Bullet, OpenVDB, and OpenSubdiv), one of the industry's leading visual effects packages (Houdini), and proprietary animation systems. This information is valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code.

Diverse Solutions to Solve Performance Problems

After an introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents a case study that illustrates how the authors used multithreading techniques to achieve better performance. The authors discuss the problems that occurred and explain how they solved them. The case studies encompass solutions for shaving milliseconds, solutions for optimizing longer running tasks, multithreading techniques for modern CPU architectures, and massive parallelism using GPUs. Some of the case studies include open source projects so you can try out these techniques for yourself and see how well they work.

With an emphasis on shadow fundamentals, the book gives an organized picture of the motivations, complexities, and categorized algorithms available to generate digital shadows. It helps readers select the most relevant algorithms for their needs by placing the shadow algorithms in real-world contexts and looking at them from a larger graphics system perspective. As a result, readers know where to start for their application needs, which algorithms to begin considering, and which papers and supplemental material should be consulted for further details.

The book explains the basic elements of hierarchies, skeletons, kinematics, deformation, skinning, and creating relationships between nodes. It gives hands-on experience with taking a completed character model and setting it up with a skeleton with kinematics and soft-skin deformation. It also gives specific instructions on using inverse kinematics systems, and how to set up the essential mechanics of a human rig with these systems. All of these lessons are conducted using a simplistic, conversational style that keeps technical and mathematical jargon to a minimum. The book also includes video tutorials corresponding to specific modules.

Essential Skills in Character Rigging takes aspiring character artists through the vital components in the process of taking a 3D character model and turning it into an animatable rig that is ready for production in film or games. It identifies the universal fundamentals at work behind character rigging, and the practical complexities of the process are broken down into simple steps that are easy to comprehend and execute.